“Time Store,” because it was based on labour being exchanged hour for hour in all sorts of produce. “Cost—the limit of price,” and consequently “no interest,” was the motto of his store, and later on of his “Equity Village,” near New York, which was still in existence in 1865. Mr Keith’s “House of Equity” at Boston, founded in 1855, is also worthy of notice.
While the economical, and especially the mutual-banking, ideas of Proudhon found supporters and even a practical application in the United States, his political conception of Anarchy found but little echo in France, where the Christian Socialism of Lamennais and the Fourierists, and the State Socialism of Louis Blanc and the followers of Saint-Simon, were dominating. These ideas found, however, some temporary support among the left-wing Hegelians in Germany, Moses Hess in 1843, and Karl Grün in 1845, who advocated Anarchism. Besides, the authoritarian Communism of Wilhelm Weitling having given origin to opposition amongst the Swiss working men, Wilhelm Marr gave expression to it in the ’forties.
On the other side, Individualist Anarchism found, also in Germany, its fullest expression in Max Stirner (Kaspar Schmidt), whose remarkable works (Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum and articles contributed to the Rheinische Zeitung) remained quite overlooked until they were brought into prominence by John Henry Mackay.
Prof. V. Basch, in a very able introduction to his interesting book, L’Individualisme anarchiste: Max Stirner (1904), has shown how the development of the German philosophy from Kant to Hegel, and “the absolute” of Schelling and the Geist of Hegel, necessarily provoked, when the anti-Hegelian revolt began, the preaching of the same “absolute” in the camp of the rebels. This was done by Stirner, who advocated, not only a complete revolt against the state and against the servitude which authoritarian Communism would impose upon men, but also the full liberation of the individual from all social and moral bonds—the rehabilitation of the “I,” the supremacy of the individual, complete “a-moralism,” and the “association of the egotists.” The final conclusion of that sort of Individual Anarchism has been indicated by Prof. Basch. It maintains that the aim of all superior civilization is, not to permit all members of the community to develop in a normal way, but to permit certain better endowed individuals “fully to develop,” even at the cost of the happiness and the very existence of the mass of mankind. It is thus a return towards the most common individualism, advocated by all the would-be superior minorities, to which indeed man owes in his history precisely the state and the rest, which these individualists combat. Their individualism goes so far as to end in a negation of their own starting-point,—to say nothing of the impossibility for the individual to attain a really full development in the conditions of oppression of the masses by the “beautiful aristocracies.” His development would remain uni-lateral. This is why this direction of thought, notwithstanding its undoubtedly correct and useful advocacy of the full development of each individuality, finds a hearing only in limited artistic and literary circles.
Anarchism in the International Working Men’s Association.—A general depression in the propaganda of all fractions of Socialism followed, as is known, after the defeat of the uprising of the Paris working men in June 1848 and the fall of the Republic. All the Socialist press was gagged during the reaction period, which lasted fully twenty years. Nevertheless, even Anarchist thought began to make some progress, namely in the writings of Bellegarrigue (Cœurderoy), and especially Joseph Dejacque (Les Lazaréennes, L’Humanisphère, an Anarchist-Communist Utopia, lately discovered and reprinted). The Socialist movement revived only after 1864, when some French working men, all “mutualists,” meeting in London during the Universal Exhibition with English followers of Robert Owen, founded the International Working Men’s Association. This association developed very rapidly and adopted a policy of direct economical struggle against capitalism, without interfering in the political parliamentary agitation, and this policy was followed until 1871. However, after the Franco-German War, when the International Association was prohibited in France after the uprising of the Commune, the German working men, who had received manhood suffrage for elections to the newly constituted imperial parliament, insisted upon modifying the tactics of the International, and began to build up a Social-Democratic political party. This soon led to a division in the Working Men’s Association, and the Latin federations, Spanish, Italian, Belgian and Jurassic (France could not be represented), constituted among themselves a Federal union which broke entirely with the Marxist general council of the International. Within these federations developed now what may be described as modern Anarchism. After the names of “Federalists” and “Anti-authoritarians” had been used for some time by these federations the name of “Anarchists,” which their adversaries insisted upon applying to them, prevailed, and finally it was revindicated.
Bakunin (q.v.) soon became the leading spirit among these Latin federations for the development of the principles of Anarchism, which he did in a number of writings, pamphlets and letters. He demanded the complete abolition of the state, which—he wrote—is a product of religion, belongs to a lower state of civilization, represents the negation of liberty, and spoils even that which it undertakes to do for the sake of general well-being. The state was an historically necessary evil, but its complete extinction will be, sooner or later, equally necessary. Repudiating all legislation, even when issuing from universal suffrage, Bakunin claimed for each nation, each region and each commune, full autonomy, so long as it is not a menace to its neighbours, and full independence for the individual, adding that one becomes really free only when, and in proportion as, all others are free. Free federations of the communes would constitute free nations.
As to his economical conceptions, Bakunin described himself, in common with his Federalist comrades of the International (César De Paepe, James Guillaume Schwitzguébel), a “Collectivist Anarchist”—not in the sense of Vidal and Pecqueur in the ’forties, or of their modern Social-Democratic followers, but to express a state of things in which all necessaries for production are owned in common by the Labour groups and the free communes, while the ways of retribution of labour, Communist or otherwise, would be settled by each group for itself. Social revolution, the near approach of which was foretold at that time by all Socialists, would be the means of bringing into life the new conditions.
The Jurassic, the Spanish, and the Italian federations and sections of the International Working Men’s Association, as also the French, the German and the American Anarchist groups, were for the next years the chief centres of Anarchist thought and propaganda. They refrained from any participation in parliamentary politics, and always kept in close contact with the Labour organizations. However, in the second half of the ’eighties and the early ’nineties of the 19th century, when the influence of the Anarchists began to be felt in strikes, in the 1st of May demonstrations, where they promoted the idea of a general strike for an eight hours’ day, and in the anti-militarist propaganda in the army, violent prosecutions were directed against them, especially in the Latin countries (including physical torture in the Barcelona Castle) and the United States (the execution of five Chicago Anarchists in 1887). Against these prosecutions the Anarchists retaliated by acts of violence which in their turn were followed by more executions from above, and new acts of revenge from below. This created in the general public the impression that violence is the substance of Anarchism, a view repudiated by its supporters, who hold that in reality violence is resorted to by all parties in proportion as their open action is obstructed by repression, and exceptional laws render them outlaws. (Cf. Anarchism and Outrage, by C. M. Wilson, and Report of the Spanish Atrocities Committee, in “Freedom Pamphlets”; A Concise History of the Great Trial of the Chicago Anarchists, by Dyer Lum (New York, 1886); The Chicago Martyrs: Speeches, &c.).[1]
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- ↑ It is important to remember that the term “Anarchist” is inevitably rather loosely used in public, in connexion with the authors of a certain class of murderous outrages, and that the same looseness of definition often applies to the professions of “Anarchism” made by such persons. As stated above, a philosophic Anarchist would repudiate the connexion. And the general public view which regards Anarchist doctrines indiscriminately is to that extent a confusion of terms. But the following résumé of the chief modern so-called “Anarchist” incidents is appended for convenience in stating the facts under the heading where a reader would expect to find them.
Between 1882 and 1886, in France, Prince Kropotkin, Louise Michel and others were imprisoned. In England, Most, one of the German Anarchist leaders, founded Die Freiheit, and, for defending in it the assassination of Alexander II. at St Petersburg, was sentenced to eighteen months’ imprisonment with hard labour. After this he moved to the United States, and re-established his paper there in New York, in May 1886. During this period there were several Anarchist congresses in the United States. In one at Albany, in 1818, the revolutionary element, led by Justus Schwab, broke away from the others; at Allegheny City, in 1879, again there was a rupture between the peaceful and the revolutionary sections. The Voice of the People at St Louis, the Arbeiter Zeitung at Chicago, and the Anarchist at Boston, were the organs of the revolutionary element. In 1883, at Pittsburg, a congress of twenty-eight delegates, representing twenty-two towns, drew up an address to the working men of America. The programme it proposed was as follows:—
First, Destruction of the existing class rule by all means, i.e. energetic, relentless, revolutionary and international action.
Second, Establishment of a free society, based upon co-operative organization of production.
Third, Free exchange of equivalent products by and between the productive organizations, without commerce and profit-mongery.
Fourth, Organization of education on a secular, scientific and equal basis for both sexes.
Fifth, Equal rights for all, without distinction of sex or race.
Sixth, Regulation of all public affairs by free contracts between the autonomous (independent) communes and associations, resting on a federalistic basis.
This, together with an appeal to the working men to organize, was published in Chicago, November 1883, by a local committee of four, representing French, Bohemian, German and English sections, the head of the last being August Spies, who was hanged in 1887 for participation in the Haymarket affair in Chicago, 4th May 1886. This affair was the culmination of a series of encounters between the Chicago working men and the police, which had covered several years. The meeting of 4th May was called by Spies and others to protest against the action of the police, by whom several working men had been killed in collisions growing out of the efforts to introduce the eight hours’ day. The mayor of the city attended the meeting, but, finding it peaceful, went home. The meeting was subsequently entered by the police and commanded to disperse. A bomb was thrown, several policemen being killed and a number wounded. For this crime eight men were tried in one panel and condemned seven—Spies, Parsons, Engel, Fischer, Fielden, Schwab, and Ling—to death, and one—Neebe—to imprisonment for fifteen years. The sentences on Fielden and Schwab were commuted by Governor Oglesby to imprisonment for life, on the recommendation of the presiding judge and the prosecuting attorney. Ling committed suicide in jail, and Spies, Parsons, Engel and Fischer were hanged, 11th November 1887. On 26th June 1893 an unconditional pardon was granted the survivors, Fielden, Schwab and Neebe, by Governor Altgeld. The reasons for the pardon were stated by the governor to be that, upon an examination of the records he found that the jury had not been drawn in the usual manner, but by a special bailiff, who made his own selection and had summoned a “prejudiced jury”; that the “state had never discovered who it was that threw the bomb which killed the policemen, and the evidence does not show any connexion whatever between the defendants and the man who did throw it,” . . . or that this man “ever heard or read a word coming from the defendants, and consequently fails to show that he acted on any advice given by them,” Judge Gary, the judge at the trial, published a defence of its procedure in the Century Magazine, vol. xxiii p. 803.
A number of outbreaks in later years were attributed to the propaganda of reform by revolution, like those in Spain and France in 1892, in which Ravachol was a prominent figure. In 1893 a bomb was exploded in the French Chamber of Deputies by Vaillant. The spirit of these men is well illustrated by the reply which Vaillant made to the judge who reproached him for endangering the lives of innocent men and women: “There can be no innocent bourgeois.” In 1894 there was an explosion in a Parisian cafe, and another in a theatre at Barcelona. For the latter outrage six men were executed. President Carnot of the French Republic was assassinated by an Italian at Lyons in the same year. The empress Elizabeth of Austria was assassinated in September 1898. These events, all associated by the public with “Anarchism,” led to the passage by the United States Congress of a law, in 1894, to keep out foreign Anarchists, and to deport any who might be found in the country, and also to the assemblage of an international conference in Rome, in 1898, to agree upon some plan for dealing with these revolutionists. It was proposed that their offences should no longer be classed as political, but as common-law crimes, and be made subject to extradition. The suppression of the revolutionary press and the international co-operation of the police were also suggested. The results of the conference were not, however, published; and the question of how to deal with the campaign against society fell for a while into abeyance. The attempt made by the youth Sipido on the (then) prince of Wales at Brussels in 1900 recalled attention to the subject. The acquittal of Sipido, and the failure of the Belgian government to see that justice was done in an affair of such international importance, excited considerable feeling in England, and was the occasion of a strongly-worded note from the British to the Belgian government. The murder of King Humbert of Italy in July 1900 renewed the outcry against Italian Anarchists. Even greater horror and indignation were excited by the assassination of President McKinley by Czolgoscz on the 6th of September 1901, at Buffalo, U.S.A. And a particularly dastardly attempt was made to blow up the young king and queen of Spain on their wedding-day in 1906. (Ed. E.B.)
